


The Cracks in Our Foundations

by cosmogyrals



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 12:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyrals/pseuds/cosmogyrals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Tosh meets Torchwood's new medic and recognises him from security footage she's edited, it's all downhill from there. (The events of Owen's flashback in Fragments, as seen from Tosh's POV.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cracks in Our Foundations

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fifth anniversary of the airing of Exit Wounds. Title from "Foundations" by Kate Nash. Loosely based on a comment from the Torchwood Archives book and mixed with a bit of headcanon.

Over the course of the year she'd been working for Torchwood, Tosh had developed software to scan a number of databases for potential abnormalities. While it wasn't a foolproof method by any means - there were far too many false positives that had to be sorted through manually - it was the best they could manage with only the two of them. She was reading through the flagged NHS records when one in particular made her pause. "Jack, take a look at this." She swiveled her desk chair to look at him. "There's a woman in her mid-twenties who was originally diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, but the latest MRIs show a distinct growth in her brain that wasn’t present in earlier scans. They’ve diagnosed it as a tumour now, and she’s scheduled to go under the knife later this afternoon.”

"Huh." Jack came over to stand behind her, peering over her shoulder as he read the file. "I think I remember something like that from our records back in the sixties. Nasty piece of work: a parasite that grows in the brain, slowly destroying the host's brain functions. Completely dormant during its incubation period, but if it's disturbed, it releases a toxic gas into the air."

"So how do you get it out?" Tosh asked, furrowing her brow in concern.

"Don't know." Jack frowned as well. "I'm not sure you _can_ get it out without killing its host - and anybody unlucky enough to be around at the time, including the people extracting it. Things like that happen, Toshiko. All we can do is hope to get there before they start to operate. I think I can get there in a few hours." He grabbed his greatcoat from the back of a chair and shrugged into it, the hem swirling around him. "You hold down the fort, and I'll be sure to keep you posted."

Tosh spent the next five hours sorting through a pile of artefacts from the vaults; she was trying to decide if one particular piece was a musical instrument or something related to dental hygiene when Jack called to tell her about the progress he'd made on his mission.

"Looks like you're going to have a late night, Tosh." His voice was tight as he spoke, a sign that things hadn't gone well for him. "I need you to start working on a cover-up for a neurosurgeon, Dr James Garrett, and his two assistants. I'll get you their names in a bit. Go with a car crash for Garrett, I think - in about, oh, half an hour’s time?"

"You aren't giving me much time to get things sorted." Tosh jotted down notes as she spoke, making a quick list of what she would need to do. Faking deaths was, she thought, one of the worst parts of her job, but oftentimes one of the most necessary. Every time she fabricated a story from wholecloth, she thought of her mother, back in London with her short-term memory wiped and no idea of what had happened to her only daughter. In Torchwood, it was so easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and forget that every victim had parents or partners or children left behind with only the lies Tosh and Jack created to comfort them.

"I've got more work for you to do once you're done with that, I'm afraid. There's some security camera footage that needs to be doctored."

"Isn't there always?" Tosh murmured. It wasn't an area in which she'd been particularly skilled a year ago, but she learned quickly.

"The woman's fiance was there - he followed me into the OR, actually. Had to chloroform him and hand him off to the nurses before I could make my getaway."

"Do you actually carry a bottle of chloroform and a handkerchief in your coat pocket?" She wondered briefly why Jack hadn't just figured out a way to dose him with retcon like he usually did - it was, after all, a fine Torchwood tradition, or so he'd told her - but disregarded it in favour of more important things.

"Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best." Tosh could hear the shrug in his voice. "Better get to work, Toshiko." And with that, he hung up, leaving her to orchestrate a number of faked deaths. 

It was nearly midnight by the time she got around to hacking into the hospital's security feeds to access the video for the relevant time frame. Sure enough, there was a wiry, dark-haired man in the footage, pacing nervously in the corridor outside the operating room. She watched as Jack came up behind him, just before both men entered the operating room itself. Video editing wasn't her specialty, but she took the frames in which he was alone and looped them, changing the time stamps in the corner to replace the frames with Jack she'd had to remove. She'd done this time and time again, making all traces of Jack vanish from scenes he'd been at, wiping the records clean and replacing them with doctored footage without an alien in sight. A click of her mouse, and it was uploaded to the hospital database, overwriting the previous footage. Tosh shut down her computer, grabbed her jacket, and left the Hub for the night.

 

"Take the morning off," Jack told her when she came into work one day a couple of weeks later. He'd been acting a bit strangely lately - stranger than usual, as Jack wasn't normal on the best of days. Tosh wasn't normal, either; she hadn't been normal before she'd spent months in UNIT's solitary confinement, and she certainly wasn't now, though she felt more capable of putting on a facade than she had when she'd first come to work at Torchwood. She knew it didn't fool Jack, but he never said anything, and so neither did she. She didn't have any friends or family in Cardiff - not even any acquaintances, except for Jack.

"What?" He'd never done anything like this before, and Tosh had to admit, she was a little confused. They were too busy to really justify any time off; she even had a tendency to turn up at the Hub on the days when she wasn't supposed to be working. "But I was going to write up that report on those cephalopods from last week," she protested, "and then work on analysing the waveforms from the preliminary readings on the Rift."

"Toshiko." Jack came up to her, gripping her shoulders firmly, and steered her back towards the door. "Seriously, I mean it. I don't want to see you till after lunch."

"What am I supposed to do?" She turned her head to look at him. 

He flashed her a bright smile and gave her one last nudge. "Go enjoy the beautiful Welsh morning." 

"But it's _raining_ ," she pointed out as the door clanged shut behind her. Tosh sighed resolutely and shouldered her bag, trudging back through the shuttered tourism office and out into the rain. 

With nothing else to do, she ended up at a corner table in a nearby coffeeshop, nursing a mug of coffee as she propped a book up in front of her. For once, her attention wasn't on the book she was trying to read; she would have ordinarily found string theory absorbing, but she found herself preoccupied by Jack's strange behaviour. Try as she might, she couldn't think of a reason why he might shoo her out of the Hub the way he had. She could have employed subterfuge to find out - everything from attempting to sneak back in (a bad idea, as Jack was sure to notice) to going back to her flat and using her Internet connection to hack into the Hub's security feed - but Jack trusted her, and she didn't want to risk that fragile trust, not after everything he'd done for her.

After she finished her coffee, Tosh went to a used bookstore to peruse their selection, rummaging through stacks of old paperback romances and cookery books. She flipped through a few novels and old university texts, then picked up a thick book of myths on a whim. She'd been reading old Torchwood files lately, and it seemed a number of alien incidents they'd investigated tended to match up to old folktales and legends, right back to the incident in Scotland that had inspired Queen Victoria to found the Institute. Jack had made an offhand comment about the Loch Ness Monster the other day, too, and she wondered just how much of what they believed to be myth could be traced back to alien visitations. She took her purchases back to the cafe, where she spent the rest of her morning flipping through the books and taking notes as she read; Tosh figured she could cross-reference things with the archives when she got back to the Hub in the afternoon.

"Jack," she called out when she poked her head around the door to the Hub, "I brought you a coffee and a sandwich." He didn't often take time to eat lunch - of course, she was just as guilty of that, and they both tended to order in when they actually remembered to eat. "Jack?" Tosh took another few steps, then froze; she heard another man's voice, though she couldn't make out the words.

"Tosh?" She felt a sudden surge of relief when Jack spoke. "Come down here, there's someone I'd like you to meet."

Someone he wanted her to meet? She was surprised that he had anyone else in the Hub at all. Tosh peered over the railing at the two men standing in the medical bay, then hurried down, the heels of her boots clanging loudly on the metal stairs and echoing through the sudden silence.

"Owen," Jack said, gesturing to Tosh, "this is Toshiko Sato. She handles security and tech...and, well, a little bit of everything, to be honest, since we're short-handed at the moment. Tosh, this is Dr Owen Harper. He's going to be our new medic."

Tosh froze as she got a good look at Owen, her eyes going wide. Though the security footage hadn't been the best quality, she could tell he was the man who'd been on the tapes a couple weeks ago - the one waiting for his fiancee, who'd died of an alien parasite in her brain. Her head was stashed in the freezers, and now Jack was bringing him to work for _Torchwood_? She knew they needed someone else - she wasn't foolish enough to believe that they could keep going on with just the two of them, not when they were working all hours of the day and night - but this? She supposed it wasn't much stranger than the circumstances that had led Jack to recruit her from UNIT's solitary confinement, though.

She realised Owen was giving her a strange look, and she shook herself out of it, giving him a polite smile as she offered him her hand. "Pleased to meet you, Dr Harper," she said automatically.

He hesitated for the briefest moment before taking her hand. "If we're going to be working together, then it's just Owen." His own smile didn't quite reach his eyes, and she got the feeling that he wouldn't have done it at all if it hadn't been expected of him. She didn't blame him, not with what she knew.

"And I'm Tosh," she replied. She'd mostly been using her nickname since she'd acquired it after moving back to England when she was twelve, when nobody really wanted to call her Toshiko. These days, Jack was the only one who used her full name. With him, it had acquired a strange sort of intimacy, one she wasn't sure she was willing to share with someone she'd only just met.

"So, Tosh, how's a girl like you end up working in a place like this?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow at her. From anyone else, in a different situation, it might have been flirting. From Owen Harper, delivered in a lazy drawl as he leaned against the autopsy slab, trying to look less tense than he obviously felt...she wasn't sure what it was. Maybe it was just an attempt at normal friendly conversation, but she doubted it.

Obviously she couldn't tell him the truth, but she wasn't sure what to say. She'd never had to come up with an excuse before. "That's classified," she said finally, trying to sound cool and collected and failing miserably.

"Classified?" Owen echoed, giving her the ghost of a smile, but one that was a little more genuine than his previous attempt. "Were you a secret agent before you came here? 'Cos you don't strike me as the James Bond type."

"Tosh," Jack interrupted, taking Owen's elbow and steering him away from her, "is our Q. And it _is_ classified. Didn't you have a cephalopod report you were going to write me, Tosh?"

She gave Jack a grateful smile before she turned back to the stairs, retreating to her desk. Though she spent quite some time staring at a blank Word document, she was thinking rather less about alien squids and rather more about their new medic. She couldn't help occasionally peeking around the side of her monitor to watch Jack and Owen talk as Jack showed him around the Hub. He seemed bewildered and sceptical, and his body language was openly hostile from time to time. She knew she hadn't been like that when she'd first started working for Torchwood, and she wondered if Jack had really made the right choice in hiring him. He didn't strike her as the sort of person who was likely to be a team player - not that _she_ was, but she and Jack had developed a sort of partnership that worked, and she wasn't sure there was room in it for someone like Owen.

 

Two weeks later, Tosh found herself in London after a spaceship had crashed into Big Ben. Her stomach twisted itself into nervous knots as she was forced to work with the people who'd once imprisoned her, and she was somehow more worried about Owen bloody Harper being incommunicado than anything else. In just a short period of time, she'd learnt that their new medic was volatile, self-destructive, and, all right, a bit of a prick - but despite all that, she found herself warming up to him. Maybe it was because she knew what had happened to him to make him that way, or maybe it was because she saw a bit of her own desperate loneliness echoed in the way he fought to keep everybody else at a distance. Maybe, she thought, he needed someone just as much as she did.

Whatever the cause, Tosh knew she was in trouble, and that her inexplicable, inexorable attraction to Owen was fucked up. He was still in mourning, she was the one who'd erased the evidence of what had really happened to his dead fiancee, and it was all completely wrong (and possibly more than a little warped). She was, she told herself firmly, quite content with not falling in love with anybody, and she very nearly believed it. 

Then she returned to Cardiff, where she was confronted with Owen's hangdog expression and still-hungover contrition. As she told him that it was all right, that she expected he would've done the same for her (except it wouldn't have been the same at all, because he hadn't been thrown in prison by bloody UNIT and wasn't half-afraid of being locked away again), Tosh realised her situation was completely and utterly hopeless. Worse yet, she wasn't bothered by it half as much as she should have been.


End file.
